The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  The various nanite hive minds phosphoresced briefly in different metallic colors to cue her that the various troops had indeed deployed to tackle their various missions. They were her miniature armada of archeologists, each one a damn good detective, but arrayed within the larger hive mind to which it belonged, an even better one by a quantum measure, and if need be, arrayed with the other hive minds denoted by the various phosphorescing colors—virtually unstoppable. They would also not be impressed by the radiation the ship was giving off or the lack of any obvious entry points into the ship. The seamless surface of the alien craft may as well have been a cheese grater pock marked with giant holes for the nanites to fly through. The nanites were small enough to insinuate themselves in between the ionic bonds of the surface of the “clam.” Once inside, they could reestablish connection with the other nanites if it had been lost in transit to recruit more mind power to deal with whatever was within the vessel.

  “Your way will never work,” Satellite said after inspecting her scientific approach to the problem. “What you’re doing is no different than trying to infect the ship with microbes.” He continued, gesturing toward the clam ship, “The thing would surely have been created to be immune to such space-borne infections to get this far.”

  She grunted. “What’s your idea?”

  Satellite didn’t immediately respond. Instead, out of his daypack, he pulled one of the many devices—which he was trying to attune like a radio as he paced about the craft. “I’m thinking whatever is allowing that ship to hover like that is our way in. We just have to find the source of the anti-gravity effect. I’m guessing, whatever it is, it hacked the Nautilus enough to draw energy from her, which it’s now using to generate the anti-gravity field. Then we can determine how it’s communicating with the Nautilus. Once we hack that line, we can unravel the alien language and just explain the facts of life to them; get the clam’s AI or AIs to understand that it crash landed after passing through the portal and that we’re trying to bring it back on line.”

  Ariel snorted. “Yeah, right. Like the AI wouldn’t be up to speed on various psy-ops games that could be run against it to get it to drop its defenses. Our own AIs have EQs higher than humans; probably why the Nautilus ignores our requests for help half the time, preferring to set her own priorities for her precious thinking time, knowing she can do so better than we can.” By “EQ” Ariel meant “emotional intelligence.” She didn’t bother explaining, realizing that techies were quite comfortable with acronyms.

  “The clam’s damaged, so maybe its EQ isn’t as high as it once was,” Satellite said, stuttering with his device, and trying to not look impacted by her near fatal blow to his reasoning. To Ariel, his referring to the alien vessel as “the clam” seemed based on sounder reasoning.

  “Yeah, well, maybe by the same logic, the clam’s immune systems are compromised. It might think the nanites I’m sending into it are part of its own body, perhaps owing to a defective auto-immune response.”

  “Hey, if that’s the case, we could get the ship to try and make peace not war by talking down the nanites, in which case—”

  “We’ll have our backdoor to its higher brain centers,” Ariel said finishing the thought for him and getting excited at the implications.

  Satellite migrated toward her with a series of bounding steps. “What? Gave up on your approach already?” she said.

  “My approach requires I become a genius in physics first to figure out how the ship is procuring its anti-gravity effect. Its anti-gravity effect is nothing like the one the Nautilus uses, and the Nautilus refuses to lend me any of her brain power right now for undisclosed reasons. The bitch.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I think our combined approach is working,” Ariel said, studying her desktop display, and pointing to the most likely candidate responsible for the anti-gravity effect they were witnessing—what looked like a specialized type of engine. “There’s one hell of a nanite war going on in there, but everyone seems more interested in taking prisoners than in killing one another, which is in line with your out-of-whack auto-immune response theory. Evidently the ship shares it, or it would be all out war. And you’ll notice the battle is taking place in the region of the ship showing the most energy output, which I’m guessing is the section generating the anti-gravity effect.”

  “That’s our in.” He joined her at the monitor, his fingers moving even faster than hers now over his virtual keyboard which communicated wirelessly with her desktop setup.

  They both looked up at the sound of one very loud thwack. The ship had been hit so hard that it was bouncing about the four walls of the chamber like a rubber ball. Its seashell shape looking none the worse for wear, thank Techa. Satellite studied the source of the attack. It was DeWitt’s kid, Thor, swinging a mace that belonged in a Viking’s hands, not a kid’s. Considering Thor’s height, he would have had to vault pretty high into the air just to swing the mace.

  “My dad does this when the TV doesn’t work. I try to tell him the flat screen TVs aren’t anything like the old tube TVs, so all he’s going to accomplish is cracking the flat screen, but does he learn, no,” Thor droned on, his eyes locked on his handiwork as he waited for the ship to settle down enough to give it another good whack with the mace. “Still,” he said, raising the handle against his shoulder in readiness for another strike, “his approach isn’t entirely without merit.”

  “Kid, you need to get out of here, now!” Satellite barked.

  “Oh, I’m not here at all. This is my avatar. I’m frozen in one of the display cases inside the Nautilus. Long story. This is my backup in case anything should happen to me, made incarnate by way of a loan from the Nautilus of some of its nanites. Another long story. By the way, could you tell my dad, who allegedly tracks better than Native Americans, to come find my ass, before I call his bluff—because I’m freezing my ass off!” The kid screamed the last part.

  The craft had settled down in the room, sinking into its original position, and Thor was already cutting loose with the mace once again. Ariel sprayed him with what looked like a miniature flame thrower she’d pulled out of her backpack. By the time the mace made contact with the ship, both the weapon and its wielder were no longer corporeal enough to be much of a concern.

  “Hey, not cool!” Thor complained, as he continued to dissolve into the fog of the nanite-mist destroyer.

  “What is that thing?” Satellite asked Ariel.

  “Sort of a nanite bug spray for this generation’s cockroaches.”

  “Huh. Need to get me one of those.” Satellite was headed back to the work station when the clam opened a portal to its insides. The solid material that would have filled the hole where the door now was had been repurposed to provide steps into the craft, which now levitated like pebbles in an invisible stream of energy. “Maybe the kid had the right idea all along.”

  “It’d go better on our egos if we believed instead that our combined hacking approach did the trick.”

  “The latter it is then. Ladies first,” Satellite gestured toward the steps.

  She thought about boarding that craft and gulped. “You look a lot less intimidating than I do. No one would believe for a second you’re of any harm to anyone.”

  He sighed, contrasting her squat, muscular physique with his leaner, dare he say, ganglier and taller figure. The glasses he couldn’t stop pushing up on his face didn’t do anything for the whole macho mystique either; he may as well have had “tech-nerd” tattooed on his forehead in neon.

  “True,” he confessed finally. Taking a deep breath for courage, and another few seconds to empty his mind entirely of the hundred and one rationalizations he had for not boarding that ship, he took the first step. Then, pushed forward on a false sense of bravado, he ran inside as fast as he could before the moment lapsed.

  Ariel waited outside the clam for a response. Any response. When none came, she reached for her sidearm.

  “Hey, it’s pretty cool in here! You sho
uld come up.”

  “There’s no way we’re both fitting inside that thing,” she shouted back.

  “Please, it’s bigger than the Thunderdome in here. It must warp space somehow.”

  She grunted. “That is definitely very cool.” She couldn’t resist any longer, and sprinted up the stairs behind him.

  ***

  “Whoa!” Ariel couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  “I know, huh?” Satellite was standing so close he was breathing down her neck. She found the sensation arousing, but then again, the ship may well have had more to do with that, and her overloaded nervous system was simply sending her mixed signals.

  The crew inside were all dead. She should have been ashamed at herself for being this aroused; the place was little more than a floating crypt. Hundreds of corpses lay limply at their work stations, their bodies distorted in their chairs by how they’d collapsed. She couldn’t count the number of different humanoids in here. It had taken a federation of planets to launch this ship, all working together toward a singular cause. Satellite’s Thunderdome analogy seemed all the more appropriate now that she was standing inside the vessel. Each of the work stations was visible along another deck of the open coliseum. Seating arrangements and work stations cascaded up the sides nearly to the roof. At the roof were the weapons systems, cloaked for now behind the opaque silvery seashell exterior.

  At the pit below her feet, where the workstations tapered down to, was an open arena of another kind. It must have been the bridge where the ship’s leaders made sense of the intel gathered at the various other workstations, which they could call up in the form of various holograms in the “theater in the round” at the bottom of the ship. That ring of leaders—their expressions frozen at what they were looking at forever—spoke volumes even in death by the looks in their eyes and the death masks carved into their faces.

  Satellite was already headed down to the bridge ahead of her. She needed another second for a show of respect to all the fallen that she felt they were owed, that she couldn’t fit into her head earlier. She must have been lost in the sea of sad sentiment, either adrift on its surface, or drowning, because it took Satellite’s voice welling up from below to get her to breathe again.

  “These various humanoids are all from different worlds! It’s not like the Nautilus where the craft simply synthesized what lifeforms it thought it might need. How cool is that? Somewhere out there is a federation of worlds! I knew Star Trek had the best take on the future; I just knew it.”

  “Or at least there was once a federation of worlds,” Ariel mumbled. She saw no reason to share her sentiments with Satellite. Artists did their best work off their creative highs or lows; until she knew more about him, she wasn’t about to crimp his style. From here on out their survival hinged on everyone bringing their A-game.

  She hadn’t bothered to hike down to the bottom of the arena to join him because up here she could view the holograms he was keying up to back up his conclusions every bit as well. It must have been why the ship was designed this way—so everyone could have equal access to the same intel being shared by the commanders. Just in case one of the small fry had an idea that hadn’t occurred to the commanders. Now, that was one hell of an egalitarian society! It made her sadder than ever to think that such a galactic or possibly trans-galactic civilization might be no more. There were too many lifeforms here to have all originated in the same solar system.

  The pictures of the individual crew members Satellite was pulling up all had star charts associated with them and a link to their home worlds, complete with video documentary-like synopses of culture, habitat, customs, and much more. The star charts validated her theory that the crewmates were all from different solar systems at the very least; beyond that, details fell short, possibly for security reasons should the ship fall into the wrong hands.

  “I found the footage of when the ship went through the star gate!” Satellite yelled up from below. That should have gotten her running after him, but she was frozen in place. Maybe some of that awe that struck Starhawk earlier was finally catching up with her. Well, Starhawk was probably the smartest of the three, so it made sense the reaction would take a little longer to spread to the rest of them.

  The hologram showed the ship sailing through the portal. As it did so, the floor lit up in the shape of what looked to Ariel like an old steel smith’s anvil, lying on its side. Wasn’t that also the shape of the artifact Natty had found on Earth’s moon? Moments later, the outpouring of light from the ship’s “birthmark” irradiated the entire crew and the workstations, frying everything and everyone.

  “I think I know what freaked Starhawk out so much,” Satellite said.

  “That shape in the floor… Inside it is a contained Singularity,” Ariel said, finishing his thought for him. Her throat had run dry.

  “It was what was doing most of the thinking and analyses for the crew, probably handling ninety-nine percent of the heavy lifting in computations assigned to each of the crewmates.”

  “Somehow it hacked the portal.” Ariel was getting aroused again. It was cool to exchange thoughts with Satellite as if he were just another voice in her head; she’d never felt that sympatico with anyone, not even her other Alpha Unit team members with which she felt very close.

  “The portal must have shut down the singularity, reverse hacked it.” Ariel was speculating, and her voice conveyed her growing uncertainty and anxiety, but not over her conclusions—over the implications of those conclusions.

  Satellite was running the moment of the ship slipping through the portal over and over again on a closed loop at various speeds to see if he could suck any more deductions out of it.

  “If I’m reading this instrument panel right, there was a one percent spike in energy radiating from the star gate at the moment it put this ship out of commission,” Satellite said.

  “Shit!” Ariel mumbled.

  “That star gate neutralized the ship’s singularity utilizing just one percent of its overall computing power!” Satellite shouted, sounding as overheated as Ariel felt.

  “We don’t know that,” Ariel shouted back feebly.

  “But it stands to reason, right?” Satellite hollered back. She could tell from his tone that he was hoping she’d prove him wrong. She had nothing to offer by way of even a semi-valid counter theory.

  “But why didn’t it want the ship to pass through?” she finally asked.

  “No idea. Does seem that the whole point of a star gate is to let things through. Unless… these things are more bug catchers than star gates, drawing advanced civilizations to them the way an entomologist uses a light in the darkness to lure bugs.” He shuddered from the chill running up his spine at his own words.

  “If we want more answers, I suggest we bump this up the food chain.”

  “And I suggest we awaken Starhawk,” Satellite said, showing more confidence in Alpha Unit with tech like this than he did in Omega Force. She couldn’t fault his reasoning. She was damned tempted to hear what Starhawk had to say at this point, and suddenly quite eager to get off the clam ship. All that awe of a moment ago was no longer creating a warm glow in her stomach; it was sending chills up her that threatened to flash freeze her ahead of Satellite, who was also trembling.

  They ran for the exit as if the ship was getting ready to combust.

  It had certainly set off one hell of an explosion inside their minds.

  TWENTY

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “A bug catcher!” Cassandra slipped through the sliding doors of Solo’s chambers like an assassin in the night come to pay him one last visit. “So help me, you better come clean now, Solo, or I’m about to get damned inhospitable.”

  Solo was pacing, playing with that cane of his, squeezing the crystal ball at its head the way people use rubber balls as de-stressors. He set the cane down and leaned into it. “Yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly what it is.”

  “When were you planning on telling us?”r />
  “When I had a satisfactory countermeasure in place. I assume you’ve been tapping the communications of the others?”

  “Don’t try to make me out as the snake in this, you walking reptile.” The truth was she felt guilty for snooping, but her mind could process more than the others at one time, and security was first and foremost in her job description. Solo’s mind, too, could process more than the others could at once, and he would have wanted access to the intel for entirely different reasons—reasons that still remained nebulous to her, which continued to piss her off.

  He raised his hand in a placating fashion. “So you know, as I do, that the work Natty and Laney are doing is all the more promising in light of recent revelations.”

  That remark caused Cassandra to back off a bit. She knew better than to try and intimidate Solo anyway. His mind was arguably even more valuable than the Nautilus’s cabal of supersentient AIs; at least it was more at their disposal. And her gut told her if he was holding information from them, it was for their own good. She just took even less well to parenting than subterfuge. And she was not about to kid herself that Solo wasn’t full of both.

  Cassandra let out a primal scream.

  “Yes, I know how difficult it is to hold oneself in check,” Solo said. “But our time will come. For now, we must allow the other players to enjoy their moment in the limelight. We all want to save the cosmos singlehandedly, but I’m afraid this is more of an ensemble-cast affair.”

  He was right, of course. She wasn’t going to think her way through that star gate. If she wanted to work out the stress of downtime—the only time she felt at all stressed—best she find that librarian who could select a workout partner for her to make sure she remained in shape come Omega Force’s and Alpha Unit’s next battle engagement.

  She stormed out of the room.

  Solo returned his gaze to the monolith floating outside their window. “We’re too damn close to that thing if it decides to make the decision for us whether or not to take the leap, by sucking us in.”